Line War (14 page)

‘You’re waffling, Trafalgar,’ said Randal. ‘Why exactly are you waffling?’

Hating to hear its old name, Erebus gave the expected response, ‘I am Erebus,’ while moving into place the means to destroy the fourteen minds Randal seemed to be distributed across. Jain microtubes wormed their way into the housings that contained the immobile ones, or else into the wormship segments containing the mobile legates, and transported grains of pure plutonium inside. Burn programs meanwhile stacked up in exterior processing units. Thus, Erebus would simultaneously wipe the renegade minds on a programming level and destroy them physically . . .

Erebus paused, suddenly uncomfortable with what it was doing. This current set-up suddenly looked all too familiar: it was so very much like the precautions humans had once taken against their AIs in the old days when humans had still been in control.

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ said Randal. ‘You call yourself Erebus, supposedly this wonderful AI melding, but you ain’t. You’re just a slavemaster really.’

Using nano-fibres, Erebus began sticking together all the plutonium grains and soon, still hidden from view in all fourteen locations, had made fourteen fist-sized lumps of the lethal metal. Now the microtubes began bringing in certain highly active compounds, which the nano-fibres distributed over the surfaces of these metallic fists in a carefully measured way. The result was a layer of one of the most powerful chemical explosives ever known. Ignition would come via an electronic pulse through the fibres, which now sank their tips, evenly spaced, about the explosive, and by now the burn programs were ready too.

‘I do see your point of view. Do you think I’ve not already analysed these things to levels way beyond the compass of any human brain? I do understand that I have not achieved a perfect melding, but it will come eventually.’ Erebus paused, then felt annoyed with itself for indulging in such purely human grandstanding. ‘Melding will come when I have finally eliminated certain impurities from myself. Like, for example, you.’

Erebus sent the kill instruction, and in all fourteen locations the burn programs set to work and the electronic pulses arrived. In true vision it observed the actinic flashes at the hearts of twelve wormships and two lesser ammonite vessels. The minds within those ships, those recalcitrant parts of its own mind, died instantly. The burn programs then spread out from those fires, shattering and wiping stored data related to those minds. For good measure, Erebus sent instructions to all the other ships nearby and instantly they turned on the fourteen stricken vessels and opened fire. Every one of them was now swamped in multiple explosions, a searing inferno that broke all matter within its compass down to individual atoms. Nothing remained of the fourteen renegades but incandescent gas, which began to cool, the atoms recombining into strange compounds and poisonous smokes.

But Fiddler Randal still stood before him.

Some remnant . . . some remaining piece of the ghost in the system yet to catch up with the destruction of its source?

‘You know, for a big melded AI superbeing, you can be pretty dumb.’

Erebus shrieked and reached out with every available resource for the figure standing before it.

Laughing, Fiddler Randal dissolved into smoke.

* * * *

5

Artefacts (pt 19).
It was said, five hundred years ago, that if the entire human race, then mostly confined to Earth, died or was relocated, little trace of its existence would remain after a further million years. All the metals would oxidize, plastics degrade, buildings and even glass would crumble, all being returned to the soil. Tectonic movement, storm, rain and wind, and the remorseless recycling of life would tear apart other structures. Even the most hardwearing ceramic would be ground up in the course of time. The orbits of artificial satellites would decay and they themselves would burn up, or they would creep away from Earth’s grip to fall into the long dark. Perhaps the longest survivors would be those items left behind on the Moon and a few footprints in the regolith there. After five million years probably nothing would remain on the surface of Earth to attest to it once being occupied by a human civilization. Such is also the case with everything the Jain, Csorians and the Atheter built. The usual artefacts you might expect to find currently in some museum glass case would not, for all three races, fill the smallest storage room in the British Museum. However, when a race’s technology reaches a certain level, other, forever self-renewing artefacts can be found: meaning engineered life. There is a plant called the Atheter Morel growing upon a planetoid called Dust, which extracts platinum from the soil of that world and deposits it on the surface in the form of crystals attached to its seeds. Some asteroids contain similar mining organisms: worms that burrow slowly through the rock and concentrate rare metals within their bodies. There are the less obvious tricones of Masada, said to have been created to grind up the remains of a past civilization. Beyond these examples we move into grey areas where debate can become somewhat heated. There are those that believe there are too many ‘useful’ living things on Earth, and posit that our homeworld must have once been an agricultural world like those on which we now grow biomodules. And maybe humans, or just one part of them, were merely a product, a crop.

- From Quince Guide compiled by humans

Dragon had, probably with the collusion of Jerusalem, kidnapped her
again.
After their initial exchange, Dragon retreated into itself, literally, and ignored her persistent queries. Mika spent frustrating hours trying to elicit some response, then gave up and began using some of the facilities available in the conferencing unit. She fed herself, got some coffee, then settled in the single acceleration chair before a set of consoles and screens that displayed data from the probes sunk into Dragon’s body and from the scanning equipment all around her. Certainly, there was a lot of activity going on down there that went beyond anything she had witnessed before. What she was seeing could not all be about astrogation or Dragon’s internal organic U-space engines. But what was going on exactly?

Hours of research produced insufficient data for her to interpret, then abruptly the sphere resurfaced into realspace, and the Dragon head with accompanying pseudopods was back to make an announcement: ‘We have arrived.’

Rather than ask where they had arrived and risk receiving a frustratingly obscure reply, Mika used the units’ scanners and astrogation programs to find out. The answer, swiftly returned, made her stomach tighten as if in anticipation of violence. She stood and gazed out through the transparent walls.

Without enhancing the view, Mika could clearly see four Polity dreadnoughts and countless attack ships, but then that was unsurprising here, even before the attack on this system by one of Erebus’s wormships. She gazed at the opalized orb of the gas giant, then down at the familiar world Dragon was approaching: Masada. It was here, some years ago, a Dragon sphere had delivered her, Ian Cormac and others, and then sacrificed itself to create an army of dracomen; here Skellor had come in the massive
Occam Razor
to create mayhem; and here she had once nearly died. But that was not all, for what had once been a relatively unimportant world outside the Line of Polity, ruled by a space-dwelling theocracy but agrarian on its surface, had become of very great importance indeed.

Subsequent events, here and elsewhere, had revealed that ostensibly wild creatures roaming Masada’s surface - the aptly named gabbleducks - were in fact descendants of an ancient alien race, the Atheter, who chose to sacrifice their entire civilization and their intelligence just to survive Jain technology. This information had been obtained from an Atheter artefact found elsewhere but now residing on the planet’s surface. It was a huge chunk of crystal that contained an Atheter AI which, in exchange for giving the Polity the means of detecting Jain nodes, had asked to be brought and left here.

‘So why are we here?’ Mika demanded.

The Dragon head, which had been gazing at the view, turned towards her. ‘As you know, I already contain all evidence relating to the destruction of the Makers by Jain technology.’

Never a straight answer. Maybe Dragon just liked people to work things out for themselves, though Mika felt the alien entity just enjoyed being obscure.

‘Have you come for your dracomen?’

‘No.’

Okay, the occasional straight answer, when it didn’t give too much away.

She noticed now how the other Dragon sphere was drawing back as this one closed in on the world. She wondered what sort of conversation her host was conducting with those ships out there, or if everything had already been said by Jerusalem, and that the ECS forces here knew what Dragon was here for.

‘You have in here a portable memstore,’ Dragon observed.

‘I have numerous portable memstores in here.’

‘One of two hundred terabytes will be sufficient.’

‘What for?’

‘Further evidence.’

With a sigh Mika walked over to a storage cabinet ranged low along one wall. She reached down and brushed a finger against the touchplate over one drawer and watched it slide out. Taking out a small satchel, she popped it open and slid out a brushed-aluminium box ten inches square and two inches thick, its comers rounded, a touchscreen on the front, and along one edge a removable strip covering sockets for a variety of plugs including plain optic, a nano-tube optic, S-con whiskered, crystal interface and even a multipurpose socket for electrical connections. Tapping a finger against the touchscreen brought up the entry menu and also a status menu. The memstore was empty but for its base format programs, and diagnostics showed it to be working at its optimum. She slid the store back into the satchel and hung it by its strap over one shoulder.

‘Now what?’

‘Now I land,’ Dragon replied.

Even in the brief time it had taken for her to retrieve the memstore, Masada had grown huge. Mika made her way back to the acceleration chair, strapped herself in and tilted it right back. She didn’t expect there to be any problems, but if there were, she would rather survive them without the need for further repairs to her body by Dragon. Soon the sphere was clipping atmosphere, and what started as an intermittent whistling turned to a constant roar as vapour trails unravelled above her. Amid the buffeting, she could now feel the tug of gravity from below running athwart that produced by the gravplates of the conferencing unit. The Dragon sphere rolled slightly, as if to give her a better view, and she now gazed down upon the face of the planet with the horizon blurring in cloud above her head. For the next half-hour, the sphere became completely immersed in cloud, finally breaking through only a few miles above the surface. Mika gazed down upon a mountain range snaking along below, then felt a tug of nostalgia upon seeing the familiar chequerboard of ponds, then the wild boggy flatlands covered with flute grasses.

Dragon abruptly decelerated, the roar from outside turning to a rumbling thunderstorm. As they descended, and as the ground raced up towards her, she briefly feared that Dragon intended burying her conferencing unit in boggy ground, but the sphere tilted up again at the last moment. Outside the air filled with boiling clouds of steam and shreds of flute grass. Mika felt disorientated, since she was being pulled by the unit’s internal gravplates, which rested at an acute angle to the gravity of the planet. The humanoid Dragon head slid into view above her, with a pseudopod on each side of it.

‘Time to step outside,’ announced Dragon.

Mika unstrapped herself and made her way unsteadily towards the airlock, while the head and pseudopods disappeared back inside Dragon. Under the combined effect of two gravity fields, it was like making her way precariously down a steep slope. Once inside the airlock, she carefully closed her spacesuit helmet, since the air outside was too thin for any human to breath. After the airlock opened she tried to convey herself with some dignity to the boggy surface a few yards below but still disorientated lost her balance and fell onto the ground in a heap. Cursing, she struggled to stand upright on a mat of rhizomes, then inspected the black mud spattered all over her suit and began stumbling through the papyrus-like flute to reach a wide area where the vegetation had been flattened.

‘If you would follow the locator,’ suggested Dragon’s voice in her helmet, as a separate frame appeared in one side of her visor. She turned to her left until the frame was centred, then set out determinedly. After a moment the frame winked out.

‘Where, exactly, am I going?’

‘To the location of the Atheter artefact.’

‘I take it there are no hooders in the vicinity?’ Mika asked, referring to a local life form whose feeding habits were a legend of horror.

‘Do not be concerned - I am with you,’ Dragon replied.

‘What?’

‘Down here with the tricones.’

‘Oh.’

Tricones were molluscs that lived deep in the mud. The latest research claimed them to be organisms biofactured by the Atheter race for the sum purpose of grinding up the remnants of their civilization here, just as the hooders were claimed as biofactured war organisms whose sole purpose now was to ingest the remains of every gabbleduck that died. So Dragon was down in the mud, doubtless spreading pseudopods throughout the area and quite possibly even feeding.